the beginning
by hermiones
Summary: When you know, you know. —Sasuke/Sakura.


**the beginning**

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He is the boy on the precipice, always unsteady and ready to swing to either side at the drop of a knife. He's a villain, he's a hero, he's callous, he's kind.

There is no brand which fits the mold that he occupies, simultaneously detestable and lovable. He is a complex that you cannot wrap your mind around, but there are a few things that are clear: he has little that he considers pivotal, and despite all evidence to the contrary, somehow, she is one of them.

She is the girl who undergoes metamorphoses, and no matter how much you detest the butterfly analogy, she undoubtedly fits the cocoon. Once a girl whose feet were her favorite thing to look at, she'd grown and embraced herself, gaze level with the horizon. She is an array of paint on a palette, equal parts curious and stubborn, strong and weak, fierce and timid.

There is no scale to quantify her qualities, and you cannot tell, no matter how hard you squint, how much he would have weighed on it.

You don't consider yourself a master of romance. There's a formula, you think, that you can follow, with the exposition first meeting, the rising action flirting, the climax confession, and the falling action togetherness.

They do not follow the formula, and it perplexes you.

But there is something _there_ just between the threads that bind them, and maybe it is steel and maybe it is cobwebs and dust, but it is _there_, and you can feel it thrumming to life, waiting to bloom.

You watch the little seed grow.

It takes years. Sometimes you think you see promise in the way her hair is tied back, in the way his precious people are of utmost importance. Sometimes, it is the drought that waxes at their skin when they separate, when something that started so innocent turned into a cloying love that toys at the idea of forever and understands that forever means through thick and thin.

You are sure, for them, that this is the end. They have only been a blip in each other's lives, a shot in the dark, two ships passing in the long night to come.

You can feel something tear, feel the reverberation of threads snapping out of place, feel the map that you once believed to be of destiny blur as the ink smudges.

The blooming red of the cardinal directions smears like blood, and a girl on a bench and a boy in a gorge do not see each other again for a long time.

The years between are only communicated in the barest instances: his eyes connecting to hers, their names spoken like prayers, and the vast, vast space that cannot be diminished no matter how close they stand together.

There is too much between them, too many years, too many lifetimes, and you will not know this yet, but too many worlds.

Theirs is a relationship that confounds you. He is tunnel-vision, and she is the expanse of the earth.

They are separated perhaps by time, perhaps by space, and you think that you could have never predicted this turn. Never in your wildest dreams would you have imagined the distances she would go for him.

Their relationship is spoken in mere breaths, measured by the vertebrae in their spines, and this interdimensional world is no exception. He is there, and even though you can see the grief pass over her face when she believes she wasn't good enough to save him, they pull through.

And he is there, just behind her back, his chest to her rigid muscles, her arm soft under his grip, his eyes more penetrating than they'd been in years. Concern, nostalgia, and the deep rift that had been between them finally closed by this return to what feels right.

She looks at him like he's some kind of a dream and a painful reality.

You do not know much about romance, but you know this: she has gone to the ends of the earth for him, and he has saved her in every way that a person can be saved.

There isn't a kiss to seal the deal, nor a heartfelt teary confession. Instead there is something that rests between the hollows of their lungs, precious and small, and even though you are not a healer, you can feel it, thrumming under your touch: hope.

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**note:** I really shouldn't be uploading this at work, but I'm uploading it at work anyway. for some reason I feel like second point of view is not allowed on ffnet but if arabesque05 can do it, so can I. anyway, this is just me playing with second pov after chapter 685, the most glorious chapter in ages. did you cry? I cried.

(but that's probably just because I'm a poor excuse for an adult.)


End file.
